Hello and welcome to a very exciting stand this year. I'm here with Adam. Adam, maybe you'd like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the fantastic Midnight mockup that we have on display here at Paris.
Great. So I'm Adam Goldstein, the founder and CEO of Archer, and we're building the future of aviation, the future of vertical lift. So we have both civil products and defense products. What you see behind me is our civil product, which is called Midnight. It is a piloted aircraft that is designed to carry up to four passengers that is used in trips that are less than 100 miles and with the idea to take people off the ground out of cars on trips that will take them 60 to 90 minutes, put them into the air with trips that will then take them 5 to 10 minutes.
Adam, I know there's been a lot of talk about this in the industry. How do you feel about the moniker flying cars or flying taxis?
The term flying cars is what the people want. They always bring it to me and they're like, 'We want flying cars.' And I think that is, you know, the thing that's happened ever since the Jetsons or Back to the Future, all these different type of sci-fi movies. But as you can see, it's a big more airplane like, so these aircraft take off and land vertically like helicopters, but then fly forward on a big wing like an airplane. So we call them aircraft, some people call them air taxis, and some people call them flying cars.
Sci-fi, Back to the Future there, but very much rooted in reality in terms of what you've been achieving with your flight testing today. Talk me through a little bit about where you are with that and where we're looking at potential entry into service.
Yeah, the good news about these aircraft is they're actually quite simple. And so these aircraft are designed with electric engines and electric engines have very few moving parts. So we have six moving parts in our engine and there's no, you know, it's not a piston or combustion engine which is a very complex machine that allows us to build aircraft that can be very safe or keep the cost down really low and ultimately scale up to a very very high level. So we began our pilot and flight test campaign which is sort of at the, you know, the later stage of the process. We've been flying our aircraft autonomously unmanned for a long time. And we've done many many many flights with these aircrafts before and it's at the exciting part where we're now starting to take people in them and ultimately with a goal to launch.
And FAA had quite an interesting paper out a couple of months ago, the downwash and outwash study. Hasn't there been any learnings or insights leveraged from that that you maybe be looking to implement into your ongoing operations commercially at least?
Yeah, there have been an incredible amount of studies that the FAA has done, that NASA has done, that the industry has done to learn about these aircraft. This is day one, okay? This is day one of a new industry. It's like we're back to, you know, 1964 and the first Boeing 737-100 came out and it's hard to even imagine what the world will become when you have products like this. And so there are lots of technical learnings that we have absorbed and lots of implementations that we have, you know, made changes but all of it is rooted in creating a product as a great customer experience that can be very very safe and obviously we're looking at the UAE as a potential maybe early market adopter.
Quite a hot environment out there. It's hot out here at Paris today but it's a little bit different. How does the heat and battery handling kind of interact?
So we've designed these systems to have, you know, certain different heat limits and cooling capabilities and so a lot of the engineering work that's done to keep aircraft cool has been done for long periods of time and so there's pretty deep understandings in how to design aircraft that way but the customer experience I think is actually very important part of this discussion too. So on very hot days it's very important to have enough air conditioning in these aircraft to make them enjoyable. So you may save somebody a lot of time but if they're super hot they will not be happy and will not want to take the aircrafts. So it's a multi-dimensional problem that Archer's working on, the industry's working on, luckily there's a lot of history in this field.
But as you mentioned Adam, the civil commercial use is only one element of a business that now spans what looks to be potentially quite a sizable defense sector for you as well.
I think the defense industry is going to be quite large with new autonomous attritable aircraft. As we watch the news every day, more and more it's clear that drones are becoming a bigger part of the solutions and so Archer announced a partnership with Anduril where we are building a hybrid VTOL product and more to come on that soon.
Any more details you're able to share about the hybrid or have journalists been asking you this all week and that's very much still a work in progress.
So we haven't shared too many details on that. We were recently in London working with, you know, the supply base there as I think it's going to be really important not just for the US but also the allies that these new types of aircraft can be built and that we can add a new type of capability into the defense industry.
And speaking of the UK and Anduril, a new UK partnership announced with Anduril Industries UK, talk us about a little bit more through about that what might mean.
Yeah. So, Archer has a deep history of building these vertical takeoff landing aircraft and so Anduril has a deep history of working in the defense industries. And so, by coming together we have an ability to create new products that can leverage a lot of the products we've already built, the electric powertrain, a lot of the aircraft capabilities, the flight controls, and a bunch of the other systems that have allowed us to build really this new type of aircraft. And so I think you're going to see a lot more about the defense side of this industry come up and more to come on that soon.
